Marilyn Monroe (49 page)

A few steps from the house was an artist’s studio where Arthur could write in tranquility. Bloomgarden was making noises in the press that he planned to stage Miller’s new play on Broadway in the fall. According to Bloomgarden, Miller had been working on the as yet untitled drama about “marital complications” since 1952. Indeed he had. It was the autobiographical play that Miller had begun after meeting Marilyn in Los Angeles with Kazan. At one point, he read aloud to
Bloomgarden and his wife, the actress Virginia Kaye, a fragment about Mary. Miller probably could have used Kazan’s help at that moment; he was admired for his ability to infuse a play with narrative drive. Miller kept writing and writing, but the material had yet to take shape.

On the morning of Thursday, August 1, Marilyn was working on her hands and knees in the cottage garden. Suddenly she was overcome by excruciating pain. She screamed and Arthur ran out. They were more than one hundred miles from New York City, but Marilyn felt certain that if only she could see her regular doctor, the baby might be saved. Arthur, frantic, called Bloomgarden, who arranged for an ambulance to take them to New York.

It was noon before they reached Doctors Hospital at the edge of the East River. Marilyn, partly covered by a white sheet, was wheeled in on a stretcher. Dr. Hilliard Dubrow examined his patient and told the Millers that he wanted to operate immediately. Precisely as feared, Marilyn had had an ectopic pregnancy. The baby could not be saved. In the interest of protecting Marilyn’s life, the pregnancy had to be terminated.

Marilyn, terribly depressed, remained in the hospital for ten days. The doctor’s opinion that she might be able to have a child later did nothing to reassure her. She said little. It seemed to Virginia Kaye that Marilyn acted as though she were “ashamed.” Kaye’s heart broke for her. Arthur was constantly at her side; nonetheless, Marilyn seemed sure that her husband really would abandon her now. In England, Marilyn had lost her dream of being a serious actress; in New York, she seemed about to lose the dream of being a wife. Though it was all in Marilyn’s mind, Arthur knew she believed she was going to lose him. He was desperate to find some way to show Marilyn how he felt about her.

The screenplay for
The Misfits
began as Arthur’s effort to show Marilyn how much he loved her. But these things have a way of backfiring. The script—and the fears, suspicions, and hurt feelings that swirled around it—would at length lead to a divorce. Meanwhile, the struggle to film
The Misfits
would bind the Millers to each other long after, to all intents and purposes, the marriage was over. If
The Sleeping Prince
had been Act
One of the Miller–Monroe marriage, the debacle of
The Misfits
was Act Two.

It started sweetly and innocently enough. Sam Shaw came to see Marilyn at Doctors Hospital. Shaw, it will be recalled, had a keen eye for movie material. He regularly made suggestions to Feldman and others about things he had seen, read, or heard that would make a good film. That’s what he did now as he and Arthur sat on a bench overlooking the East River near the hospital. Marilyn took the loss of her baby as a sign that something was wrong with her. Miller was saying that perhaps the right sort of role would make her feel better about herself.

The conversation turned to his short story “The Misfits.” Miller related the plot. The intensely visual story, full of light and color, was about three cowboys who hunt wild horses in the Nevada back country. One of the men has a girlfriend named Roslyn. In the story, the reader knows about Roslyn through what others think and say about her. Obviously, her character would have to be filled out in the screenplay, but Shaw was convinced it would be a great part for Marilyn.

Marilyn was released from Doctors Hospital on Saturday, August 10. That morning she put on a full-skirted, sleeveless sundress that made her look a bit like a child on the way to a birthday party. She applied lip liner and an eye pencil. She had her hair curled by a hairdresser. There was something terribly poignant about the elaborate preparations. Marilyn knew the press would be waiting downstairs. Her costume, hair, and makeup were a tacit acknowledgement of their right to be there. She put on a good face as photographers clamored grotesquely at the windows of her ambulance.

During the slow, three-hour drive to Amagansett, she and Arthur hardly spoke. He could think of nothing to say to comfort her. She was devastated that she was probably never going to give him a child. Not long after she arrived home, Marilyn took an overdose of sleeping pills. Her husband found her collapsed in a chair, her breathing irregular. In the course of the marriage, that sound would become terrifyingly familiar. But now he needed a moment to grasp what it meant. Once he did, he phoned for help, saving Marilyn’s life.

In hopes of giving Marilyn a gift, Miller put his autobiographical play aside—it hadn’t been going particularly well anyway—and began work on
The Misfits.
The author of
Death of a Salesman
intuitively knew the importance of retaining one’s dream. Isn’t that what Willy Loman
had been desperately struggling to achieve? And wasn’t it a failure to do so that drove Willy to suicide? Perhaps Miller could write a script that would enable Marilyn to live up to her ideals.

He burrowed in his studio from breakfast until suppertime. He had not worked in such a sustained fashion since the marriage began. Knowing the degree to which he valued and protected his work, how could Marilyn fail to see that writing a screenplay for her was Arthur’s way of publicly declaring his faith in her?

At the same time, spending hours away from her may have been the worst thing Arthur could have done. In the weeks after Marilyn left the hospital, there was a substantial change in his work habits. If he wanted to reassure her of his love, disappearing all day was likely to have the opposite effect. At a moment when, as he understood, Marilyn most intensely feared rejection, their days apart could only feel like a confirmation that, yes, Arthur was withdrawing.

Probably there was some truth to it. Though Miller told himself he was doing this for Marilyn, he seems to have retreated from the emotional chaos of his marriage to the familiar safety zone of work. He couldn’t handle Marilyn’s problems any better than she could. Bent over a typewriter in the quiet of his studio, a cigarette or pipe stem jammed between his teeth, at least he had the comfort of being in control.

To understand the fears on both sides of the marriage, it’s useful to consider the metaphors Arthur and Marilyn used in speaking about themselves. On Miller’s side, there was a sense of threat. He had complained to Laurence Olivier that Marilyn was devouring him. He compared her to a vase—lovely when intact but dangerous broken, the shards having the capacity to cut and kill.

Marilyn, for her part, focused on what was driving Arthur away. She spoke of the monster inside her. By that she seems to have meant the rage that was in sharp contrast to the shyness and sweetness she tended to project. In the beginning, Marilyn said, Arthur had perceived her as a victim, beautiful and innocent. She tried to be those things for him. When inevitably the monster disclosed itself, Miller was shocked and disappointed. He started to pull back.

Whether motivated by love, a desire to retreat, or most likely a mixture of both, Miller wrote
The Misfits
at a feverish pace. He seemed to be writing against death, as though his words were capable of saving
Marilyn. It was as though once he finished the screenplay, by an act of sympathetic magic the shattered vase would be whole again. But the idealized portrait of her he was writing—a picture of the woman he’d fallen in love with—was also clearly an attempt to hold onto his own image of Marilyn. After the horror of England, he seemed to be trying to reassure himself that she really was the beautiful innocent he thought he’d married. On a conscious level,
The Misfits
may have been intended to show Marilyn he loved her; but in a deeper sense, Miller also seemed to be trying to convince himself.

Soon he had pages to show her. As she read, he watched and listened. Marilyn laughed out loud reading about the cowboys. But her reaction to Roslyn was hardly what Arthur expected. Suddenly, she was cautious, reserved, unenthusiastic. Arthur sincerely believed that in creating the character of Roslyn he had done something wonderful for Marilyn, but she certainly didn’t act as though he had. She wouldn’t even commit to appearing in
The Misfits.
No wonder he later admitted to having been hurt.

What accounts for her response? Marilyn believed that for Arthur to love her, he also had to accept the monster in her. The extent to which he idealized Marilyn in his script suggested that, far from accepting the monster, he wanted to pretend that it didn’t exist.

There was also the fact that Marilyn was vastly more experienced in film than Arthur. She had read a great many scripts over the years. Did she immediately perceive flaws in her husband’s screenplay? That would certainly constitute a change in the relationship, a shift in the balance of power. Had Miller written a stage play for her, it would have been different. The stage was his domain. But film was something she actually knew a great deal about. In this area, he was no longer the teacher, she no longer the pupil. Suddenly Marilyn was in a position to judge, to criticize, even to reject what Arthur had written. Until this point, Marilyn had regarded Arthur as the great writer, the man of principle, the idol. It had always been a question of whether she was worthy of him.

In writing a screenplay, Arthur made it possible for Marilyn to suspect his motives. When they met in 1951, Miller had been in Hollywood trying to sell a script. For one reason or another, he never managed to get
The Hook
made. Back then, Marilyn had been an obscure starlet, a nothing. Since that time, she had become a star. Her name attached to a
script could mean the difference between it being produced and it languishing in a desk drawer. It could mean an important director and co-stars. And of course, it could mean a great deal of money.

Had Arthur offered Marilyn a stage play, there could have been no doubt that he was doing it for her. He would have been providing her an entrée into his world, the world of the theater. He would have been conferring his prestige as a playwright upon her. As it was, he needed Marilyn’s prestige to get
The Misfits
made. Whatever his intentions, there was at least the appearance that an ambitious husband was using a movie-star wife to cash in.

Marilyn had checked out of Doctors Hospital convinced that she was about to lose Arthur. Now, by writing
The Misfits
he permitted Marilyn, in her paranoia, to construct a self-loathing explanation for why he remained after her failure to give him a child—he wanted to jump-start his film career. Marilyn had a history of suspecting people of using her. With the best will in the world, Joe DiMaggio, by example, had encouraged her to be wary of others’ motives. Arthur’s screenplay, begun as an attempt to make Marilyn feel better about herself, soon appeared to have very much the opposite effect. It seemed only to confirm that, childless, she was no longer of interest as a wife. From then on, the only way Marilyn would be able to believe that Arthur still loved her was if he stopped trying to get
The Misfits
made.

THIRTEEN